


Except Sometimes He Doesn't

by kevin_solo



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Post-Series 03: Children of Earth (Torchwood), Pre-Season/Series 10
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:33:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28687947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kevin_solo/pseuds/kevin_solo
Summary: "A young child standing by her mother’s side just stops. She freezes. The mom tries to move forward in line and the girl will not follow. The woman tugs on her daughter’s sleeve and tells her to “stop acting silly.” She thinks it's a game but The Doctor realizes it is so much worse than that."The Doctor, working at St. Lukes, is on Earth during Children of Earth, but can't step in to stop it. After everything is said and done, he finds Jack.This will be a multi part fic about The Doctor during and after the 456 invasion.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Twelfth Doctor & Jack Harkness
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

One fall morning, The Doctor waits in a coffee shop just off of St. Luke's campus. He doesn’t need the caffeine, he doesn’t even like the taste of the drink, but it lends him an air of normalcy. It keeps the students and other professors from gossiping as much. There have been rumors about him for years, some of them are true, some of them are the preposterous fiction that humans invent to explain anything they don’t understand. But one thing everyone who works in his building notices is that he never seems to go home which spawns all sorts of rumors: he doesn’t sleep (false, he just doesn’t need 8 hours a night), he’s homeless (only technically true), he’s having marital problems (false, well true if not being over his wife who died the first day he met her is ‘marital problems’ but he doesn’t think that's what they mean). Everyone seems to notice that he is always in his office when the college employees come in for the day and that he’s always there when they leave. If he drinks coffee it might make it look like he's simply a dedicated professor, not that he hasn’t left. So he makes a show of it. Every Monday, he brings coffee to the professors who have offices in his building, and makes sure to always have a cup in his hand when he’s delivering it to their offices. He drinks coffee for the same reason he keeps pictures of River and Susan out in the open. Sure he misses them, but he spends most of his time in the halls of the Tardis or by the vault, if the pictures were just for himself he’d keep them there. It always feels like an invasion of privacy to have a photo of his wife just sitting out there for anyone to see, but it makes it seem like he has a family of his own.  
While he’s waiting for the barista to finish his rather large order of 7 black coffees, 5 lattes, 3 cappuccinos, 3 mochas, and 2 flat whites, a young child standing by her mother’s side just stops. She freezes. The mom tries to move forward in line and the girl will not follow. The woman tugs on her daughter’s sleeve and tells her to “stop acting silly.” She thinks it's a game but The Doctor realizes it is much much worse than that. This is a moment that no crack in time can erase, it's a fixed point that plays off such a visceral fear, the loss of children, that humans throughout time fear it. By the 45th century it becomes an urban legend, the facts of the case become muddied for everyone except academics, but the general story is passed from student to student in the school yard. Each planet seems to develop its own details, on one it is the prime minister who murders the civil servant and his family, on another the aliens demand 100% of the Earth's children, on another the aliens are said to be humanoid and to have walked among humans for years before making their demands. But every planet knows the story of an alien race announcing its arrival through children, demands to be given a large number of kids for some malicious purpose, and are ultimately driven away. In the future, it is schoolkids who spread the story, keeping it alive in the minds of the people generation after generation. But it is not until those kids grow up and have kids of their own that they realize how horrific the situation was. When they realize it, they hold their children close and promise that they will do whatever it takes to protect them.   
But no one on Earth except The Doctor knows this, he is forced to watch as the child begins to move again. Her mother scolds her for holding the lineup but moves on quickly. Only The Doctor is left with a sense of dread about the week to come as he picks up his order.  
As he walks back to the campus he tries to process what is about to happen, but finds himself at mental roadblock. It’s a fixed point. There is nothing to do. What happens over these next few days has to happen. He learned years ago that he shouldn’t mess with fixed points, that either reapers will be forced to cleanse the time stream, reality itself with fracture, or the universe will compensate, making it certain that he won’t be able to stop the suffering. He considers taking the motor bike out of the Tardis and booking it to Cardiff as fast as he can to just be there for Jack, but decides as he enters the building that it is too risky, that he might mess up the timeline, or so he tells himself. He thinks that maybe he is just a coward, he doesn’t want to see Jack through it all. Either ways, he decides to stay in Bristol and hole himself up in the university until it is all over. Entering the main building of campus, he is glad he isn’t known for a friendly smile. He can look as dower as he feels and no one will bat an eye. He delivers the coffee even more silently than he usually does. The head of the psychology department, a woman named Elizabeth, notices the change and asks him what's wrong. He thinks that in another life he might have enjoyed traveling with her. He lies, “It’s nothing, just woke up cross.”  
She eyes him skeptically before commenting, “Well, hopefully you’ll feel a bit better after you’ve had your coffee, eh?”  
He leaves the room without another word, quickly delivering the rest of the drinks before settling in at his desk, burying his head in his hands.


	2. Chapter 2

Somewhere in his mind, he must have known this was coming, but he is getting so old he never made the connection. 

“Good morning sir, how-” Nardole pauses as he enters the office. “Are you feeling alright?”

“I’m fine, Nardole.” The Doctor says.

“I’ve been with you long enough to know that’s a lie.” Nardole responds. Usually, The Doctor tries to be more subtle and Nardole will just have to notice if he spends more time at the vault, or if he locks himself away in the TARDIS, or stops playing his guitar for a week or two. It is rare that he will just sit in his office with the lights low and his head down.   
The Doctor looks up from his hands, “Its history. I can’t change history and we are about to live through it. Have you ever heard of the 456?”

“I don’t believe I have.” Nardole responds.

“They’re an alien species who are on their way to Earth as we speak. They are why the children froze this morning, why they will speak in unison later.”

“So why can’t you do anything about it? You know? Warn someone, tell someone how to stop it.” Nardole responds, The Doctor can’t leave the vault unattended but there must be something he can do.

“It’s a fixed point. I have to stay out of it. If I change anything, everything the whole future could change. You could cease to exist.” The Doctor explains, “Though that wouldn’t be the worst turn of events.”

“Oy! I’ll remind you that I still have permission to kick your ass.”

“I doubt she meant that as a standing threat.”

“She’d want you to do something to help.” 

“There’s nothing to do. Torchwood will take care of it. People will die, others will suffer, but the world will be saved. It is what has to happen. I can’t make that better. I’ve tried to save people I shouldn’t. It doesn’t work” The Doctor tries to explain. Last time he saved someone it cost him someone he loved. Or at least he thinks he must have loved her. Why would he have been so desperate to get her back if he didn’t love her? Between Pete and Adelaide and Ashildr, saving those who can’t be saved has caused him so much pain that he can’t even remember it all. 

“But you know what she’d say.”

“Of course.” The Doctor responds looking at the picture of River. Without hope, without witness, and without reward, the words are seared into his soul. They are how she saw him, the traits that make him himself. Throughout all his lives, the changes in looks and personality, working without any expectation of praise or even an expectation of change is what ties him together. He used to think it was a memory, but it's not. Memories, he has convinced himself, is not what makes someone himself. They can’t be because if they are then the Donna he dropped off at home what was only months ago on Earth was not the same woman who saved the world and he is not the same person he was the last time he was on Gallifrey. He can’t remember who he was trying to save, but he won’t accept the idea that he isn’t still the same person she must have known him as. If memories are what makes one themself, he lost a part of himself. It must be the basic values River laid out that make him himself. It must be.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Well then,” Nardole tells him, “I’ll leave you to think about it.”

The Doctor is left in the silence of his own thoughts, clueless about what to do next. He’s good under pressure in an emergency and, at least with this regeneration, fine at staying put when things are calm or when he knows that a past version of himself is off helping. When the Daleks came he made sure to get the students on campus inside and hidden away, but knew that somewhere he was off saving the universe so just small things felt like enough. This is different, nothing he can do will be enough. The best he possibly can do without definitely messing up the timeline would be to help Torchwood into hiding or to be there at the makeshift morgue that will have to be created for the victims of the 456 for Jack when he wakes up, though that might have unintended consequences. Instead of making any real choices, he decides to change the topic of his lecture today and takes the laptop out from his desk drawer. It’s clunky and slow but he’s glad to finally be in the internet age with laptops and smartphones. Even though he has always been able to use the technology in the TARDIS that is far beyond anything humans have ever dreamed of, it is nice to be able to create power points and openly use computers that are able to retrieve information efficiently.  
His lecture that day is midmorning and the room fills as though it is any other day. He can’t help but think about how in just hours the world will change forever. By lunch the children of the world will stop to announce the arrival of a hostile alien force. That day, he lectures on mortality and the absurd. It was originally supposed to be on astrophysics but Jack is on his mind and, more specifically, the guilt and pity he feels for his friend is weighing on him. The lecture ends up discussing if life be any less absurd if it were longer. If life were so long that one is forced to live through generations, to see the rise and fall of civilizations, and had no end in sight, would the world still be absurd? Or is death what gives life meaning rendering a life without an end more absurd?

By the time he walks back to his office after the lecture ends, he’s almost forgotten about the events to come but maintains a sense of unease. He sits back down behind his desk with a stack of papers to grade and has started when Elizabeth rushes into the room. 

“Doctor?” She asks cautiously, “I hate to impose, but could you do me a favor?” 

“What’s the issue?”

“My daughter. I just got a call from the school saying the kids are all speaking in unison or something so they are sending them home for the day, but I have classes and meetings all afternoon. My husband is visiting his sister in America, and I don’t have anyone to look after her. She was supposed to go to a friend’s house but that’s not going to happen. I know you are supposed to have office hours, but do you think you could keep an eye on her while I teach? She’s 7 but she’s well behaved.” She explains quickly.

For the smallest moment, The Doctor isn’t sure what to say. He feels bad for her, she’s clearly both worried for her daughter and struggling to balance this emergency, an emergency that she does not know the half of, with her duties as a professor, but The Doctor wants to avoid this point in history. But this is what he does, he helps people. It might not be as exciting or dramatic as staring down a Dalek and talking himself out of extermination or mending a crack in the universe, but it’s the same idea. He helps so that people can live their lives and sometimes that means saving planets or reality itself and sometimes it just means babysitting a coworker’s child while he waits for someone else to save the world. “Of course. I can keep an eye on her for the afternoon.”

“Thank you. Hopefully everything will be back to normal tomorrow.” She says.

“Yes, hopefully.” The Doctor responds, knowing that things are bound to get worse before they get better.


End file.
